Whatṣar‘means—seizures,madness,andthevocabularyofthejinn'stouch

Today the word usually means the epileptic seizure: a convulsive disorder, a temporary dysfunction in the brain affecting the nervous system, producing convulsions mild or strong, in which the person may fall, the eyes bulge, the tongue is bitten and foam appears. The classical position the source states is that ṣar‘ “may be organic or spiritual”: caused by the body, or by a jinnī. The word is also used more loosely for episodes of derangement in speech and action that come at intervals from mass.

The Hanafi jurists’ definition (from the Ḥāshiyah of Ibn ‘Abidin, Book of Divorce): the failure of the faculty that distinguishes the good from the ugly and foresees consequences — its effects no longer appearing, its workings suspended. They then list three causes: a deficiency the brain was created with; the brain’s temperament thrown off balance by an imbalance or disease; or the shayṭān gaining mastery over the person and casting corrupt imaginings into him, so that he rejoices and panics without any fitting cause. The classical jurists themselves listed organic and satanic causes side by side, in one legal definition.

Madness, and also, in another usage, minor sins. The malmūm is the madman; “a lammah from the jinn struck him” means a mass, a touch. The related “al-‘ayn al-lāmmah” is the eye that strikes with harm. In the hadith recorded by Abu Dawud and al-Hakim, ‘A’ishah relates that Jamilah was the wife of Aws ibn al-Ṣāmit, “a man who had lamam — and when his lamam grew intense he would pronounce ẓihār against his wife”: the episode behind the opening of Sūrat al-Mujādilah.

Literally “to touch with the hand”; borrowed for striking and for intercourse (both being touch), and then for madness — as if the jinn had touched him. “Bihi massun min junūn”: there is a touch of madness in him (an-Nihāyah of Ibn al-Athir). This is the word the Quran uses in al-Baqarah 2:275, and the word this whole section of the site is named for.

Said of a boy: “a lamam or a ṭayf from the jinn has struck him”, meaning something of them has come over him. Originally the word meant madness; it was then used for anger, and for the shayṭān’s touch and whisper. Both readings, ṭayf and ṭā’if, are transmitted in the verse “Indeed, those who fear Allah — when an impulse (ṭā’if) from Satan touches them, they remember…” (al-A’rāf 7:201). From the same root comes the dream-apparition (ṭayf al-khayāl) that visits a sleeper.